During Covid, a lot of people paused long enough to ask themselves a question they’d been too busy to consider: is this working?
For Heather McElrath, the answer led somewhere unexpected. After years of building communication strategies, she stepped back from a model that felt transactional and impersonal and started over with a different question: what would it look like to build something that felt meaningful?
The result was Sandbox Communications, a boutique marketing communications agency in Virginia. The name was deliberate.
“A sandbox is where you build, experiment, and solve problems without fear,” McElrath says. “That’s the environment I try to create for my clients.”
In practice, that means something specific. Rather than chasing headlines or one-off media wins, McElrath focuses on helping small business owners build the kind of credibility that compounds over time, the quiet, behind-the-scenes infrastructure that makes the right opportunities easier to attract. It’s a slower approach than most people expect from PR. It’s also a more durable one.
That philosophy found a natural home in a new book released during Women’s History Month. “Speak Your Way to Sales: Expert Strategies to Turn Speaking into Sales, Clients, and Growth” (Eaton Press, 2026) brought together 10 women specialists to give small business owners the tools that tend to live inside established networks like strategy, credibility-building systems, and the visibility infrastructure that most speaking advice leaves out.
The need for it is real. Research suggests roughly 70% of speaking bookings still flow through existing referral networks, which means opportunities tend to cluster around familiar names. For the women who make up nearly half of all new U.S. business owners, that dynamic can make an already competitive field feel even harder to enter.
McElrath contributed Chapter 5: “Stop Chasing Gigs, Start Attracting Them: The PR Playbook for Speakers.” Her chapter makes the case that speakers who consistently earn premium fees and repeat invitations aren’t simply the most talented in the room.
They’ve done the quieter work of building authority before they ever take the stage.
She brings the same thinking to Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she teaches PR Essentials as an Adjunct Lecturer, working with students of all ages navigating a rapidly changing field.
“Speak Your Way to Sales” is available now on Amazon. Learn more at eatonpress.com/speak-your-way-to-sales.
